He had simply sided with the right people.
In the years that followed Rogachev set about modernising the company, raked in considerable profits and swallowed up a German and an English steel giant in quick succession. He invested in aluminium, signed contracts with the government relating to the extension of the Russian railway network, acquired shares in European and Asian car companies and made a fortune in China, with its hunger for raw materials. At the same time he was painfully aware that he had to take the interests of the powerful men in Moscow into account. In return the sun shone for him: Vladimir Putin assured him of his high esteem, Dmitri Medvedev invited him to his table as an advisor. When the world market leader Arcelor Mittal was plunged into a crisis, Rogachev took over the ailing steel giant and put himself, with Rogamittal, at the top of his field.
At around this time Maxim Ginsburg, Medvedev’s successor, had so permanently abolished the boundaries between private business and politics – which were eroding in any case – that the press dubbed him the ‘CEO of Russia PLC’. Rogachev paid homage to Ginsburg in his own way. One very drunken evening, in fact, it turned out that Ginsburg had a daughter, Olympiada, taciturn and of no apparent charm, whom the president was anxious to see married, if possible to someone of a wealthy background. Somehow Olympiada had managed to complete a course of studies in politics and economics. Now she was a Member of Parliament, expressed her love of her father in referendums and faded away without having blossomed. Rogachev did Ginsburg the favour. The marriage of these two great fortunes passed off with much pomp, except that on the wedding night Rogachev shunned her bed and went elsewhere. From then on he was, in fact, constantly elsewhere, even when Olympiada gave birth to their only son, who was entrusted to a private school and from that point onwards seldom seen. Ginsburg’s daughter got lonely. She didn’t know how to respond to her husband’s enthusiasm for martial arts, guns and football, even less to his constant affairs. She complained to her father. Ginsburg thought of the 56 billion dollars that his son-in-law put on the scales, and advised Olympiada to take a lover. She did exactly that. His name was Jim Beam, and he had the advantage of being there whenever you needed him.
How on earth was the poor woman going to survive the next fourteen days?
Evelyn Chambers stretched her Latin physique. Not bad for forty-five, she thought, everything still firm, even though the inevitable muscular fatty degeneration was beginning, and signs of cellulite were appearing on her bottom and thighs. She squinted into the sun. The cry of seabirds filled the air. Only now did it strike her that there was just one single cloud in the whole of the sky, as if it had strayed there, a cloud-child. It seemed to be floating very high up, but then what was height? She would be travelling far above the point where clouds dwelt.
Up, down. All a matter of perspective.
In her mind she ran through the members of the travelling party, assessing them for their media usefulness. Eight couples and five singles, including her. Some of those present would not welcome her participation. Finn O’Keefe, for example, who refused to go on talk-shows. Or the Donoghues: hard-line Republicans who didn’t much care for the fact that America’s powerful talk-show queen supported the Democrat camp. Admittedly Evelyn’s only active excursion into politics, in 2017, when she had fought for the office of governor of New York, had begun in triumph and ended in disaster, but her stranglehold on public opinion remained unbroken.
Mukesh Nair? Another one who didn’t like going on talk-shows.
Warren Locatelli and his Japanese wife, on the other hand, had entertainment value in spades. Locatelli was vain and coarse, but he was also brilliant. There was a biography of him entitled What if Locatelli had Created the World?, which accurately captured his vision of the world. He sailed, and had won the America’s Cup the previous year, but his chief enthusiasm was racing. Umura had for a long time appeared as an actress in indigestible big-screen experiments before enjoying a succès d’estime with Black Lotus. She was snooty and – as far as Evelyn could tell – free from any kind of empathy.
Who else? Walo Ögi, Swiss investor, art collector. Involved in every imaginable area from property, insurance, airlines and cars via Pepsi-Cola to tropical wood and ready meals. According to rumour, he planned to build a second Monaco on behalf of that country’s prince, but Evelyn was more interested in Heidrun Ögi, his third wife, who was said to have financed her photographic studies as a stripper and an actress in porn films. Also part of the group was Marc Edwards, who owed his popularity to the development of quantum chips so tiny that they were switched on and off with a single atom, and Mimi Parker, creator of intelligent fashion, whose fabrics were woven with Edwards’ chips. Fun people, sporty and socially committed, moderately exciting. The Tautous might have more to give. Bernard Tautou had political ambitions and had earned billions in the water business, a subject that preoccupied the human rights organisations with monotonous regularity.
The eighth couple, finally, came from Germany. Eva Borelius was seen as the uncrowned queen of stem-cell research; her companion, Karla Kramp, worked as a surgeon. Flagship lesbians. And then there was Miranda Winter, ex-model and squeaky-voiced widow of an industrialist, as well as Rebecca Hsu, Taiwan’s Coco Chanel. All four of them had already opened their hearts to Evelyn, but she didn’t know the slightest thing about Carl Hanna.
She thoughtfully rubbed her belly with suntan oil.
Hanna was strange. A Canadian private investor, born in 1981 as the son of a wealthy British diplomat in New Delhi, who had moved at the age of ten with his family to British Columbia, where he later studied business. Apprentice years in India, death of his parents in an accident, return to Vancouver. He had clearly invested his inheritance cleverly enough never to have to lift a finger ever again: according to rumour he planned to invest in India’s space trip, and that was that. The CV of a speculator. Of course, not everybody had to be a bighead like Locatelli. But Donoghue boxed, for example. Rogachev was trained in all kinds of martial arts and had bought Bayern Munich a few years previously. Edwards and Mimi dived, Borelius rode, Karla played chess, O’Keefe had a scandalous drugs career behind him and had lived with Irish gypsies. Everyone had something that identified them as a person of flesh and blood.
Hanna owned yachts.
Originally, Gerald Palstein had been scheduled to fly instead of him: the director of strategy of EMCO, the third-largest mineral company in the world, was a free spirit who had, years before, thought out loud about the end of the fossil-fuel years. Evelyn would have liked to meet him, but the previous month Palstein had been victim of an attempted assassination, and injured so badly that he had had to cancel, and Hanna had stepped in.